Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, a radiation imaging system, and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
As a radiation imaging system for examining breast cancer, a mammography apparatus is used. When, however, mammographing a dense breast (a breast with more mammary gland tissue), the lesion detection sensitivity and specificity may deteriorate because of the overlapping between a lesion portion and a mammary gland structure. As techniques of compensating for this drawback in mammography, tomosynthesis and breast-dedicated CBCT (Cone-Beam Computed Tomography) apparatuses have attracted much attention. These apparatuses are featured to provide 3D images of the breasts to allow observation of a lesion portion and a mammary gland structure in a separate state.
The related art includes the following technique. For example, pieces of predetermined tag information are extracted from a plurality of medical image data obtained by apparatuses available from different manufactures or of different models, and a grouping condition is set to recognize, as images of the same type, images each having one piece of tag information or a combination of a plurality of pieces of tag information of the extracted pieces of tag information.
There is proposed a medical image processing apparatus (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-41585), which determines a grouping condition with respect to images to be interpreted at the time of interpretation to recognize even images obtained by apparatuses available from different manufactures or with different model numbers as images of the same type as that of images used for layout setting, thereby enabling the reproduction of a layout.
Conventional medical image processing apparatuses have not been able to display radiation images of the right and left regions which are symmetrical to each other in association with each other. When separately imaging the right and left regions, in particular, the conventional medical image processing apparatuses have not been able to display the respective radiation images in association with each other.